On Monday, President-elect Donald Trump will be officially sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, with a compliant Republican-controlled Congress eager to ram through his agenda. But he could face significant difficulties despite those majorities.
That’s according to journalist Jason Linkins, who recently argued in a New Republic essay that Democrats have a unique opportunity to frustrate Trump’s second term plans if they act strategically and in unison. He wrote that because Trump is now term-limited, Democrats no longer have to concern themselves with ways to preemptively drive him out of office. Rather, he suggested that Democrats have a unique opportunity as a pure opposition party to shackle Trump — who made “I alone can fix it” his catchphrase — with an unlimited number of both domestic and international crises to solve.
“In his second term, it should be the task of liberals to force Trump to swallow a daily spoonful of the very real job stress that [former President Barack] Obama struggled so mightily to endure,” Linkins wrote.
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“To get there, liberals need to get into the business of identifying the problems that real Americans face (which honestly, is something they could stand to relearn how to do) and more forcefully blame Trump for those problems’ continued existence,” he continued. “They need to raise a hue and cry over everything under the sun that’s broken, dysfunctional, or trending in the wrong direction; pile line items on Trump’s to-do list, wake him up early and keep him up late. Every day, get in front of cable news cameras and reporters’ notepads with a new problem for Trump to solve and fresh complaints about the work not done.”
Some of the looming problems Linkins alluded to are the ongoing housing affordability crisis, with Newsweek reporting Saturday that the housing market will be a “thorny problem” in his second term. Should Trump follow through on his promise to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods and a 10% tariff on Chinese imports, it could deal a significant financial blow to millions of Americans. Canadian Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson recently warned that Trump’s proposed tariff on the United States’ northern neighbor could cause gas prices to jump by as much as 75 cents per gallon for some Americans, due to the high volume of oil the U.S. imports from Canada.
The president-elect also vowed on the campaign trail to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, which could cause major economic headaches for industries like agriculture, construction, hospitality and healthcare. Should corporations suddenly face a massive labor shortage in the wake of those deportations, it could trigger economic fallout that Linkins says Democrats can then pin that on both Trump and the GOP in advance of the 2026 midterm elections.
“Beyond that, there will be the typical crises of American life — economic predators, polluters, corporate scofflaws, and public health concerns — that Trump has either shown no interest in helping abate or has personally empowered via the decisions of his plutocratic-minded Supreme Court appointments,” he wrote. “Democrats should already be planning to hang all the foreseeable albatrosses around his neck, and gaming out how they’ll swiftly nail Trump to the wall for the crises that catch him by surprise.”
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Trump will also inherit a multitude of highly volatile foreign policy crises in his second term like the ongoing war in Ukraine, instability in the Middle East (including both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the new Syrian regime) and China’s potential invasion of Taiwan. Linkins noted shortly after the November election that the president-elect was “dogged by generals who opposed his fascist inclinations.” And he quoted Bulwark writer Jonathan V. Last, who hoped Democrats would “make Donald Trump own every bad outcome that happens, anywhere in the world.”
“I think that Last is on to something,” Linkins wrote. “I’d actually take this a step further. Rather than exert so much energy trying to thrust Trump out of the presidency, liberals would be well served to spend their time thrusting the presidency upon Donald Trump. Instead of searching for illusory quick fixes for the existence of the Trump administration, start demanding the Trump administration fix everything quickly.”
Click here to read Linkins’ piece in its entirety (subscription required).
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